PC-TRIO: A Power Efficient TCAM Architecture for Packet Classifiers

Abstract—PC-TRIO is an indexed TCAM architecture for packet classification. In addition to index TCAMs, PC-TRIO uses wide SRAM words. On our packet classifier datasets, PC-TRIO reduced TCAM power by 96 % and lookup time by 98 % on an average, compared to PC-DUOS+ [28] that does not use indexing or wide SRAMs. PC-DUOS+ was shown to be better than STCAM, which is a single TCAM architecture conventionally used for packet classification [28]. In this paper, we also extend PC-DUOS+ by augmenting it with wide SRAMs and index TCAMs using the same methodology as used in PC-TRIO, to obtain PC-DUOS+W. On ACL datasets, PC-DUOS+W reduced TCAM power by 86 % and lookup time by 98%, compared to PC-DUOS+, which demonstrates the effectiveness of indexing and usage of wide SRAMs in reducing power and lookup time for packet classifiers. Index Terms—Packet classifier, incremental updates, power, TCAM. I